7/25/2011 Japanese Nuclear Emergency Director: You Have No Right to a Radiation-Free Life

Source: Gizmodo
Date:  7/25/2011
by: Sam Biddle


This footage, from a recent meeting of indignant Japanese citizens and feckless Japanese government types should be a little shocking. Sadly, it's just more of the same—ineptitude and inaction. Buy denying the right to avoiding radiation? OK, shocking.

The Tokyo meeting was meant to broach the push to expand the evacuation zone around Fukushima—a zone that's proven inadequately and dangerously narrow. One Fukushima resident asks, "As other people do, people in Fukushima have the right to avoid the radiation exposure and live a healthy life, too. Don't you think so?"

A Nuclear Safety Commission Of Japan rep, when pushed to go beyond his canned non-answer, deadpans "I don't know if they have that right." The crowd reacts as you would expect when told they nuclear-threatened welfare isn't a concern. After being jeered at by the understandably outraged audience, and ignoring requests to test the radioactive content of young residents' urine, the government panel packed up and left.
If you could compress the past four months' anxiety, tension, crisis, inaction, confusion, and stifled anger into one meeting room, you'd produce the above, this smoldering radioactive diamond of national failure. [via Boing Boing]

Editor's Note: Here is a plea from parents in Fukushima City for an official evacuation order from the Japanese government. A must read if you have not already.

7/17/2011 Residents of Fukushima trapped in dangerous radiation contaminated areas due to lack of government evacuation order/aid

7/5/2011 Japan groups alarmed by radioactive soil

Source: AFP
Date: 7/5/2011

TOKYO — Soil radiation in a city 60 kilometres (40 miles) from Japan's stricken nuclear plant is above levels that prompted resettlement after the Chernobyl disaster, citizens' groups said Tuesday.

The survey of four locations in Fukushima city, outside the nuclear evacuation zone, showed that all soil samples contained caesium exceeding Japan's legal limit of 10,000 becquerels per kilogram (4,500 per pound), they said.

The highest level was 46,540 becquerels per kilogram, and the three other readings were between 16,290 and 19,220 becquerels per kilogram, they said.

The citizens' groups -- the Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation and five other non-governmental organisations -- have called for the evacuation of pregnant women and children from the town.

The highest reading in the city of 290,000 people far exceeded the level that triggered compulsory resettlement ordered by Soviet authorities following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, they said.

Kobe University radiation expert professor Tomoya Yamauchi conducted the survey on June 26 following a request from the groups.

"Soil contamination is spreading in the city," Yamauchi said in a statement. "Children are playing with the soil, meaning they are playing with high levels of radioactive substances. Evacuation must be conducted as soon as possible."

The coastal Fukushima Daiichi plant has been spewing radiation since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out its cooling systems.